Browns' museum project moving forward, should open in 2014

The Browns announced in May they were donating their collection to the museum along with $13 million for design and construction of the new structure.

EILEEN ZAFFIRO-KEANSTAFF WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — The dream is starting to take shape. The Museum of Arts & Sciences has hired Ormond Beach-based Bomar Construction and Winter Park architecture, engineering and design firm RLF to create the new home of the most extensive collection of Florida art anywhere in the world. The new building, which will go up in a wooded area just north of the museum, will house more than 2,600 of Cici and Hyatt Brown's oil and watercolor paintings that show scenes of Florida rivers, wildlife at play and historic structures that reach back to the state's earlier days. Construction is set to start in February, and the new museum building should open sometime in 2014. "We're very excited about it," said Cici Brown, who looks forward to people learning about state history from the works and older viewers traveling back to the lost Florida. "It's coming together. We've got a great team." The Browns announced in May that they were donating the collection to the museum along with $13 million dedicated to the design and construction of the new structure. The Browns and other private donors will also give additional dollars to a multimillion-dollar endowment for the operation and maintenance of the new building. The Browns spent nearly 20 years collecting the paintings, and decided in recent years they wanted to share them with the public. Things fell into place this spring when the city donated a 30-acre tract of land north of the museum. "This building will be something really special," said museum Executive Director Andrew Sandall. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It's kind of what you dream of, to be able to create a whole new building with a fully documented collection and to have donors so involved." The new 25,000-square-foot building will be just south of the Sutton Place Apartments at the corner of Nova Road and Orange Avenue. Unlike the museum's existing 100,000-square-foot building that's hidden from view in a 90-acre preserve, the new structure will be visible from Nova Road. It will be accessible from a spur off the existing driveway that winds back into the museum property. Sandall said weekly meetings are being held now with design firm RLF, which is behind structures such as the Florida Supreme Court building in Tallahassee and several buildings on the Rollins College campus. The hope is a design will be completed by the end of the year, Sandall said. At the helm of decision-making for the new building is a 10-person committee that includes Sandall, past and current museum board members and Cici and Hyatt Brown, board chairman of Brown & Brown insurance agencies, a Daytona Beach-based corporation that last year grossed $1 billion. The new building will be one story and will include an education center, café and gift shop, museum officials say. There won't be ample space for all 2,600-plus paintings to be on display at once, but a rotation plan for the galleries will allow visitors to see all of the paintings within a 10-year period, Sandall said. Paintings not on display will either be in secure storage or on loan, he said. The style of the building has yet to be determined, he said. "We're not sure if it'll be modern," Sandall said. "These are old Florida paintings, and we want to work it in with the landscape. We want something that fits where it is." Brown said she's purposely tried not to envision what the building could look like because she knew it would be a team effort. But she agrees with Sandall that it needs to blend with its wooded space and take its inspiration from the what will be inside the structure. "We have this beautiful setting and now we need to capitalize on it," she said, noting the committee has even talked about ways to muffle noise coming off Nova Road. "We want something in tune with the collection."